Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

Legendary is yet another game this year that has been released and has totally let all of us FPS fans down, but what a surprise right? FPS games are probably the most prone to failing terribly due to lazy level design, bad story, bad physics and anything else you put in an FPS. Unfortunately, Legendary does almost everything wrong and hardly anything right, but you can still squeeze a few drops of fun out of this weekend rental. Legendary puts you up against Pandora's Box's creatures that starts taking over and destroying the world while trying to be controlled by the evil LeFey.

While the plot sounds semi-interesting it takes a face dive right into a mud pit once you start playing since you don't really give a crap after about thirty minutes. If playing the game is hard enough as it is the mechanics the game is built around are totally slapped together and not very well done. Even when I saw videos of this game I knew it didn't look complete and they actually shipped the game unfinished. First and foremost, the main culprit is the Unreal 3 engine. Now I'm not bashing the engine at all its just many developers tend to think U3 will MAKE the game for them and they just have to tell it what to do and that is not the case. There are a lot of similarities to BioShock, in fact, from the Animus powers shooting out of your hand (with almost exact animations), to the same glowy look on everything you interact with. While the game looks half way decent everything looks like it was copied and pasted into the game instead of built there. You're wondering around a war torn London and New York and you don't even feel like you're there since the game doesn't replicate the cities at all not even famous landscapes for Christ sake! On top of this the physics are way off and everything seems to stick like glue or something and it's just really weird. There's terrible collision detection to where enemies will go through walls and stick there and start flopping around like some kid with Down Syndrome.

This is also coupled with cramped levels, linear levels, and everything just looks the same. Turn this wheel here, kill these creatures here, shoot these wire suspensions here, bypass this keypad here. The game is very tedious and just completely retarded and put together so poorly. Even moving your character is even a pain since when you get hit on one side you stop moving that way for some strange reason and I have no idea why. You'll be strafing left and then get attacked by your left, but you just stop dead in your tracks and you have to jam the stick left a few times before even moving again. The guns don't feel powerful at all and are just completely retarded with almost no recoil, they are all standard such as shotguns, machine guns, a rocket launcher, and a weak pistol that does NOTHING. The most original weapons is probably an axe but even the more powerful weapons take awhile to tear down foes coming after you. The enemies are just absurdly difficult to bring down even on the easiest setting. For some unknown reason the weakest enemy (Blood Spiders) just swarm after you and you have to find the sac holding them and getting there can be a pain since this leads into the lame healing system. Other enemies range from werewolves, minotaurs, griffons you name it.

These are cool enemies and shouldn't have anything go wrong but it does anyways! They throw so many enemies at you and you never feel powerful enough to take them down so you're constantly scrounging your health with the difficult healing system. You have this power from your hand called Animus, so you take Animus Clouds from dead creatures and you use this for health. You hold down Y to take it, but it takes so long to absorb it all and this is NOT good when you have a ton of guys shooting at you or creatures clawing at you. You hold down Y again to heal yourself, but as you can see, using the same button to heal and absorb is not going to work very well. When you're near clouds you absorb them instead of healing and vise versa. If you double tap Y (why are we double tapping with so many buttons!) you can do an Animus Push to stun enemies and this does absolutely nothing. Now when it comes back to the combat you can't use any melee attacks, no cover system NOTHING, ZERO, ZILCH, SQUAT! You have to hide behind everything and peek out like a stupid old PlayStation game from 6 years ago. This makes things ridiculously annoying during the unbalanced levels that are badly designed.

This game just has so many things wrong you wonder what there is to like? Well its for the sheer epicness that game seems to pull off with 300 foot Golem, a HUGE krakan you fight in London, and even the giant Griffon's are cool to kill. If you can bear through this 6-7 hour campaign you can find some fun in this game. With a different story, decent graphics, cool enemies, and lots of big bosses you can have fun once. Legendary, this definitely, is not.